Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  So he chose to be friends with his grandmother—but friends instead of relations or something else unknown to him—having never told her he wasn’t friends with her. Which maybe he never had not been. It wasn’t her fault his mother had taken herself away; and his grandma had been there all along regardless of any view of his; and he even fell thoughtfully in love with his grandmother again, but was more aware of time now, so in knowing his feeling like a man was O.K. but a little early and tough though it didn’t feel tough, he did all over again feel a man. And the day dreamt radius of one school morning faded into his life countersinking there some power he wouldn’t take, particularly because it went on thinking itself into the future unless he reined it back a little like beeg thoughts that if shortened find their true area, as closely real as it is troublesome—that is, to survey such facts without taking the speed, juice, and directed path out of such moving bodies the better to see them.

  So he found his grandmother again and they were talking about the weather. They went that much back into her old yarns, when people cared to know why weather happened as it did. The two weathers of the Anasazi Medicine Man and the Hermit-Inventor of New York, who in one of his successive incarnations, just one year before meeting an editor’s daughter on an island that belonged to Bedloe among the littered limbs and deep-mined uncratings of a Statue he called a French gift for comic art, had witnessed a tornado so symmetrical it sustained itself for two hours, while the Anasazi Healer, who said if you reject the Yuma preventive of an ounce of mesquite wood ashes and purest brook water and must choose the pound of cure as my old friend the Hermit-Inventor of the East has taught me, go ahead and beat your belly with rocks (knock knock), but if the wind turns to hail or even rain you may wind up having the baby anyway—thus the alte Anasazi who would ever be six hundred and more years of age but whose death without-reincar-nation was real and important, having precipitated an eastbound cloud un-precedentedly noctilucent and low that was to be contemplated as weather and not for its long, slow trip in the lee of a young Indian man (the boy flickeringly, and the man less and less, recalled) tracking during 1894 (a hundred years or so before the end of the world) a young Anglo woman one day to be herself turned into a mist and temporarily secreted if not inhaled by a statue large as a giant rising from the waters of an aging harbor.

  The two weathers of downcoming and upgoing were not quite the same as observed ("just seen") and created ("suddenly made, y’know"), or the weathers of presence ("there") and absence ("not there") in turn not the same as the two weathers of leaving and arriving; nor were these pairs to be parceled or paralleled equally between the Anasazi Healer and the Hermit-Inventor. For the Indian and the Anglo agreed as well as disagreed regardless of their relative distances from each other; they were near each other sometimes even to the point of meeting, and yet they were oftener far remote, while the Hermit in his Net-Space-Traversed seemed less a hermit than the Anasazi who dwelt in a high rock cell but in order perhaps to be visited by those wishing to be away from where they were and get a glimpse of the more than old man; and he was visited by images, winds, and creatures of everlasting hues and waters including his friend the Hermit and the alleged Mena (woman-zoologist, Chilean, specialist in the javelina and its hind-mounted scent glands, also in horse-bone meal) and the troubled young Navajo Prince, who for the love of a strange girl visitor had abandoned his principal pursuits, his studies of the northern bison tongue’s energy potential, the improvement of corn crops, the messages of Earth told in the apparent motions of storm mass and dry cloud from mountain to mountain or the transparency of an aborted fetus.

  The grandmother’s grandson thought a minute, as if like an avalanche of warm air the events during that awful summer, which was always the year of his father’s age, had not happened; he said he didn’t remember if the East Far Eastern Princess had ever gone to see the Anasazi Medicine Man; then he caught himself—It doesn’t matter, Gramma.

  Doesn’t it? she asked, piqued, at odds with him and ruffled but not flummoxed; No, she supposed it didn’t.

  For what would she have gone to the Anasazi Healer for? He wasn’t your general practitioner, nor much interested in disease (his own people having all died out hundreds of years ago), though you don’t always go to a medicine man to get rid of some old Eurasiatic disease, and the lady in question, bearing upon her person an aura as real as the turbulence a person may conveniently release from his or her heart system in order to externalize it so others may enjoy it, may have trusted the phenomenal specialist she consulted who was himself so old he was about ready to become a more or less fragrant crumble of herb fossils to be read on the concave floor of his retreat, if she knew how to read such herbs, for she knew next to nothing of the lore, only that the fern leaf of the reddish-lavender-bloomed redstem storksbill showing in early spring in open areas where the soil has been disturbed may cause upheavals in the womb that are heard as if from afar until they come closer like a dream and may be woken from but whose releasing magic may be overvalued by some women who imagine they seek swift solutions when in truth they seek knowledge—until, with his gentle wisdom, unaccompanied by what went without saying (that he would respect her privacy), her aged host the Anasazi Medicine Man said that in a few days she would know what to do and then the how would follow naturally; and she went away feeling at once that she had arrived and was all of a piece, which when she told her future husband many weeks later at the other end of the world he took to mean "all in one piece," which he echoed gratefully. But by then the intermission in her life was over, and he was a good man and it didn’t matter what he said—

  —because the two weathers of leaving and arriving went on regardless, observed the grandson (and we who were his Choor relations often so far from the country he inhabited as to be beyond body though bound in many bodies saw that her smile at being told this seemed pensive and neutral, not an elder being told a bedtime fancy by a child though charmed by how he said "regardless" at the age of fifteen and even sadly dubious at the soft corners of her infinitesimally downturned mouth, though she was the one who had thought up a long time ago leaving and arriving, to express what she recalled).

  Where did he recall a tornado?—I’m getting old, Gramma, losing my memory. Let’s see, she said, fifteen is only the first prime you’ve passed. But he did recall a tornado, and there’d been a division of opinion. The Hermit-Inventor of New York looking upward described it according to his lights and claimed to have seen the whole flotsam-jetsam the tornado snapped up and took away to its grand crocodile nest (the Hermit humorist), and chewed up, bag and baggage, animals, people, some possibly both, and some so ruined as to turn into each other, all in the rotational storm that toured the area like an early Geiger-sucker and that went away across a mesa and could be heard but in the uproar not seen, then suddenly came back (But but but but, didn’t he see?)—because (he said) the only thing it had done was leave, after having been in the Earth there to begin with and would never in any sense have arrived—for it had only left.

  The Hermit knew with his own eyes, however, that the winter wind when it leaves New York precipitates the arrival from an equal and other area of spring air: and this must be exactly as real as those consequently materializing birds which the Anasazi on the other hand knew had in fact never left as birds or anything else, but became the winds, whose many-voiced, potentially screaming speeds were but streaming cloaks for their absolutely unchanging spirits: and he, on this other hand, from his acquaintance with the steeps of Taos’s holy Blue Lake where the ponderosas hold the upwind and keep it from getting away, and from his acquaintance with the heated, standing-still breezes of the desert to west and to south, knew that wind only appears to move in or move on, but really waits at rest in invisible skins of breath and when the sky speeds up, to come even with the Earth it hardly knew was as entranced by it—say, a slippage or molding shrug or searching readjustment by the sky frictioning the Earth possibly in memory-for-future of those rare times
when all the layers of light hiding us from death but each with its cleft may shift into line leaving one great wheeling spoke-like, aisle-like cleft—those invisible skins of breath at rest in all the places of the country are stirred to make their breath blow outward from their fierce stores of force so that few of the People if any know certainly that a wind blowing from Nevada land or from northwest isn’t a wind blowing in truth to New Texas or to southeast, or "aimed," as the Anasazi understood the habit of the breath winds when let out of the skins—or cells, said the Hermit, because according to the grandmother he was always remembering the cells that hermits of other times lived in in Yay (or Yea, Ti, or Ye) which was a dry but not thirsty site that Choor never annexed. (Guess they was both of them windbags, said Mayn years later to his son asleep and his daughter awake, but his daughter didn’t say anything, while his wife from another room called "were.") And when he said he was reminded of old General now new President Harrison’s Inaugural Address in 1841 whose deathless prose when subjected to spoken time went on over an hour and a half in the March air even after Daniel Webster had spent days pruning it and old Harrison had refused adamantly to wear his overcoat, caught his death, and departed almost at once after his arrival, the listening daughter said quietly, Get back to the night-shining cloud made of the Medicine Man’s remains that followed the Navajo Prince across the continent following the Princess east. Well, the father said, kissing her and then his son, there’s a lot of gaps in the record. Fill it in, said his daughter, how about it, Dad?

  Come to think of it, that young Indian must have been in Pennsylvania right about the time young Alexander was, because that was his one stint for the family newspaper the Democrat, the early preparations for Jacob Coxey’s Easter march on Washington (Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, But Death to Interest on Bonds!) and he met Chris Columbus Jones near Rockville who believed in some recompounding of the soul’s chemicals, called it reincarnation (industrial reincarnation!) and believed in Coxey’s road bill and his non-interest-bearing-bond bills for municipal improvement loans that came in a dream to this self-made sandstone-quarry tycoon who did not believe in prayer but in action but against the deep-laid plan of monopolists to plough the poor under, crush them to the Earth, whose sin was not the begetting of children whom Parson Malthus declines to economically christen but only that they have come to the dinner table after others have already fallen to. Coxey’s child was named Legal Tender, and that was Massillon, Ohio, and somewhere in there Margaret had had tea with Coxey on her trip home from the West.

  How about it, Dad? Fill it in. But Mayn had finished with so much of that at age fifteen when he took up with his grandmother again, who could help him with French, that he would ask how high it snowed out there and hear his grandmother regret she had not seen excessive amounts of snow while among the Indians, but ... but .. . (but what? he thought, imagining that she didn’t want to talk about the trip back) while he himself had this sight that didn’t leave him as if it saw him of the Statue of Liberty being drifted with snow higher and higher—no kidding, with snow from the West—cripes, some kind of record, that’s for sure, or when the old stuff hit him later in life he would check out for instance that avalanche of warm air he knew she had said rushed down a mountain slope for a week before one awful night of lightning and hailstones, hailstones like trees made of luminous bole-ring timber that wrecked a horse and practically annihilated a woman, and wonder if, well, you could honestly get that type of weather after a sort of maddening Washoe Zephyr running down mountain or in the Urals the wind White Russians (or so told an interrogand) call the Ilya that jams luckless landsmen with restless ions running down Urals as down the grandmotherly eminences of the West or what she described with a good deal of invention inevitably—which all wasn’t what his daughter wanted to hear but she was young and even at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen would not, like her father before her, ask Gramma how the Indians had broken their horses, or if there had been any fighting against white people she’d told him about who were also poor—all this rather than complete any more that dubious record arising from his grandmother’s strange sources and occasionally supplemented by the boy’s young inventions such as (inspired by listening to a dog that had just survived being "snow-ploughed" by a car at a moment when a child in the car unaware of the skidding dog looked out the closed window of the back seat and silently with eyes closed sneezed and the dog had trotted away putting the experience behind him though first sounding that high metallic wheeze that’s as nearly beyond our hearing as our Kultur’s sound vibes that will pain a dog) that the Hermit-Inventor, who knew his friend had never written a word, not a colon, not a comma, not a Sequoya point, heard the Anasazi healer’s last-breathed words over an incredible distance not just of space (one mile horizontal, sixty-five feet vertical) but of the real time (estimated by the Hermit on arrival as "a while") that brother Anasazi had been dead, heard said sounds (said last words of the already-awhile-dead hence now-ageless Anasazi) by means of a slow-carrier pre-sound like what the boy many years previous had made with pursed lips to his grandmother when in bed together in the early morning, auditing the generalized soft snores of the grandfather in the adjoining room, because his grandmother had been showing him how to whistle, "learning" him because you can be taught only what you know already. And if at sixteen when this was all about over, but earlier at fifteen when his mother had vanished from life—yet in prior years as well—he went on feeling something like his very self-like body literally beyond his wish to get hold of it or drop it, something he had to be or do—a thing as real as a thing—he left it to those growing relations inside him and the world to store leaving and arriving along with hints of dawning hailstorms sifting the wake of a great bird (that had a not so great disposition) whose terminal activities might have no more navigational bearing on a story-book tornado around 1894 than the muscle of a frantic horse reflected the mind of the tense eastbound rider or some risk blowing its shadow over that rider’s shoulder. Yet if the conjunction of the Navajo Prince’s instinctive (while doomed) departure in pursuit of a person he thought he loved with the precipitate recovery of his demon-tenanted mother to actual life brought the boy to the hour when the Hermit-Sojourner (sensitive to an overall convergence flow-pattern) tore the East Far Eastern Princess from the company of the local maidens who sang of their as yet unborn children while grinding and whisking the corn flour as she their precocious visitor wove at the measurable Anglo speed of beginner’s luck upon spindles three of forked, sheet, and streak lightning according to the old saw, and one spindle the white-shelled rain-streamer, but she had just that moment finished and could go calmly, whatever the alarmed inner voice of her would-be guardian who told her when she came to where he was that she must leave at once and ride eastward, her bird was not going in her right direction, she must let it go its way back to her childhood haunts in the foothills of Choor: but, arriving at this moment, the boy, having to speak, asked questions other than what moved him to break in—hadn’t it been flash lightning before? and the Hermit-Inventor of New York had not done any tearing of the Princess, for she had left her work as if nothing was the matter and walked simply to her pony (a gift she’s going to take home with huh) and ridden someplace to rendezvous with her hermit who advised her that if she could let herself be altered to a mist and spirited into the Statue assembled that had been only semi-uncrated pieces when they’d met in ‘85 ("the year after that skinny old geezer," interjected the boy, "saw the two-hour-long tornado according to him") then the Navajo Prince’s mother would live again—